My high school homeroom teacher, Mr. Grescovich, had some twenty homemade signs up in his classroom that extolled various life lessons. They were all home-made; and therein lay their charm. Since I went to what was then an all-boys school, Mr. G. got away with some mild profanity with which the Jesuits took no issue.
My favorite was, “When you ASSUME, you make an ‘ASS’ out of ‘U’ and ‘ME'”.
Such is today’s debate on Afghanistan. Plenty of assumptions are flying around, and the intelligentsia class is debating which to follow, and which to discount.
Richard Haass, the respected President of the Council on Foreign Relations, made a dangerous one over the weekend in a Washington Post editorial:
Al-Qaeda does not require Afghan real estate to constitute a regional or global threat. Terrorists gravitate to areas of least resistance; if they cannot use Afghanistan, they will use countries such as Yemen or Somalia, as in fact they already are.
It’s a mistake to assume that al Qaeda – the only group that ever had both the intent and capability of conducting a massive attack against the United States – has perfect mobility to just pick up and move from the AF/PAK border region to Somalia, Yemen, or Kalamazoo. It’s not that easy.
Al Qaeda is ensconced in that region and will remain so. It’s true that the group is much weakened from previous incarnations due to the ongoing NATO/Afghan offensive. But weakness doesn’t increase mobility: if faced with the choice of: a) riding out the counterinsurgency while hoping to reconstitute itself in Afghanistan/Pakistan after a delay, and b) picking up and moving to Africa or the Saudi peninsula, then it isn’t even close.
In fact, the second option simply isn’t possible. Even if al Qaeda is limited to some 100 full-time fighters, I’ve got a crisp $20 bill that says a good percentage would be captured trying to cross any significant international border (excluding, of course, the one between Afghanistan and Pakistan). Do you think UBL has a passport? Do you think he wants one?
What’s more, a hunk of usable real estate is a critical component to preparing a massive terrorist attack against the United States. While the London and Madrid bombings required nothing more than a few apartments in Leeds and Leganes respectively, the scale and complexity of those attacks – quite small in comparison to 9/11 – mirrored their planning environments. Furthermore, those groups had neither the intent nor capability to attack the United States.
But al Qaeda used to, and can again under the right circumstances. Free from the watchful eye of a competent local security service and protected under the veil of an amicable local government, a plot can be planned and rehearsed to increase its complexity, scale, and range by several orders of magnitude.
Therefore, Afghan real estate is a highly valuable commodity. And we need to permanently deny Al Qaeda access to it.
